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participatory medicine

You’re in the doctor’s office as she tells you that she’s very sorry, but you have lymphoma. Later, before you walk out of her chilly exam room and into your changed life, when you ask how you can find out more about your disease, she says, “Whatever you do, don’t go looking on the Internet.”

Yet that’s precisely what you will do because guess what: Looking for health information is the third most popular activity online, according to a Pew report released last year.

That “human capacity to be online? That’s the most powerful tool any organization has,” said Dr. Farris Timimi, a cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic and keynote speaker at the annual Social Communications and Healthcare conference organized by the Business Development Institute in New York City last week.

Timimi has made his name in digital circles praising the benefit of social media for healthcare and, more importantly, for science.